We were still on the South Side when I tumbled from the car. A security camera hovered overhead, taping me as I retched through the gates and onto someone’s shiny black driveway.
Leo put the hazards on and shot outside to check up on me. “Get back in the car,” I said. “I’ll be fine.” I spat and cleared my throat. A moment later, Leo held out a towel. I took it, wiped my mouth.
“Thanks for not throwing up in the Chevy,” he said.
We drove back to campus with the windows open, the cold air lashing my face. I knew I had to convince Leo to speak to Hardy, but I couldn’t even get him to talk to me. My entire body felt like a smoldering furnace being tripped from high to low. Palms sweaty, feet frozen. My imagination fueling my sickness. Aidan had drowned. This was certain. But how she’d slipped into the water was now unclear.
Leo pulled back into the Gas Mart and parked. We sat for a moment, then he said, “If I tell some cop that I was driving your friend around, I’m as good as cooked.”
“It won’t be like that,” I promised.
“I’d be incriminating myself. Making trouble where there is none.”
I said, “The truth is always dangerous.”
“Well, that’s just some slick thing to say.” Leo twisted the empty beer can in his hands, the metal making a sharp, painful sound. “What do you know about truth or danger? You’re just some dumb rich kid at a second-rate school.”
“Third-rate.”
Leo almost smiled. He scratched at his cheeks, bloodying one of his boils.
He was conflicted, but I figured I could sway him, convince him to come forward, so long as I didn’t push.
“There’s a right thing to do here,” I said.
“No,” Leo said, “there isn’t. I don’t know what happened to the girl after I dropped her off. When I drove you out to Race’s tonight, I thought I wanted to know. Thought there was something to be gained by knowing. Figured you’d confess and we’d go from there.”
If before I’d heard fear and compassion in Leo’s voice, suddenly I heard something else: money. I slipped out of the car, then leaned into the open window. “What exactly did you have to gain?”
Leo didn’t need to say a word. He’d taken a chance that I’d done something worth hiding and that I’d be willing to pay for my secret. He’d picked the wrong guy, but he’d also acted in opposition to his own character. He was shaking. “Forget this. Forget all of it,” he said. “It never happened. I made a lousy mistake.”
Walking back to campus, I unbuttoned my shirt, hoping the night air might chill the nausea out of me. My lungs filled with cold, my breath foggy. If what Leo had said was true, and I wasn’t entirely certain that I could trust him, I needed to consider a new series of possibilities. With some keen urgency Aidan had gone to Race’s home. She’d needed to see me. A gust of wind slammed against my body. My hand fell across my chest and though my skin should have been icy, my fingertips burned from my own radiant heat. I had a fever and needed to put myself to bed.
When I got back to my room, I saw the torn paper bag with Riegel’s present. My plan had been to open it with Aidan. To tell her the story of my day with Riegel and for the two of us to tear into his gift. Though I didn’t deserve any presents, I took out the box from the Whaling Museum. A black ribbon was tied loosely around a long narrow carton. Inside, a glass bottle rested on a wooden stand with a piece of cork stoppered inside the neck of the bottle. Where I expected to see a ship, instead the glass held a large ceramic whale. With a ship in a bottle, all a person had to do was rig the masts and then, once the ship was glued into place, raise the sails. I couldn’t understand how a person could put a whale inside a bottle. The bottle felt heavy in my hands as I rotated it, looking for seams in the glass. There was a boat after all. A tiny dinghy with small faceless sailors balanced in the whale’s shadow.
The sailors in the dinghy rowed with their backs to the whale, blind to their oncoming danger. During a whale hunt, there always must have been a moment when the hunt could have gone either way. When the harpooned whale might have plunged underwater and taken everyone in the dinghy down with her or when the harpooneer might have struck the perfect, life-ending hit. It was all I could do not to go to the headmaster’s house and wake him up to tell him that my friends had been among the last to see Aidan. I wondered if the weight of my accusations alone would be enough to sink them. On Monday, classes started again. I woke up sick and it took all my strength to climb out of bed and throw up in my garbage can. Lying on the floor, I noticed that there was something else in the bottom of Riegel’s gift bag. The tangerine Aidan had given me. It looked as fresh as the day Aidan dropped it in my lap. I put the tangerine on my bureau, coughed up more bile, and decided to sign myself into the infirmary. After dressing quickly in a sweater and jeans, I walked down the hall, leaving my garbage can filled with sick in front of Kriffo’s door.
In the hallway, I met Tazewell coming out of Yazid’s room. He reeked of cheap air fresher and expensive weed. I nearly clocked him when he asked how I was doing.
“Not well.”
“Yeah. You don’t look so good.”
“You look like shit,” I said, a little too harshly.
“Yeah, maybe.” He smiled. “But I never get sick. Nature’s medicine.”
Tazewell and his stoner routine. He leaned against the wall, obstructing my exit. “Man, it was so nice to have a week with no classes. Felt like we were in college. That reminds me, Kriffo’s pissed at you.”
“Why would he be mad at me?”
“You’re going to Princeton, right?”
“I applied.”
“Well, you and I are legacies, and they never take more than two
students from here. Until you came along, Kriffo thought he had a shot. With his grades, he’ll be lucky to get into Syracuse.” Tazewell checked his watch. “We should be roommates.”
Outside Whitehall, Nadia stood on the walkway, balancing her weight on one foot. She’d swept her brown hair off her face and back into a high ponytail. It looked funny, like a rooster’s cockscomb. She wasn’t wearing any makeup. She lightly touched my arm and said, “Her mom’s here.”
On her way to the bathroom that morning, Nadia had seen a woman, “prettier than any Astor girl,” carrying boxes from Aidan’s room. “I thought you’d want to know.” Nadia was wearing a loose T-shirt and a long gypsy skirt. She tripped over the fabric as she walked with me to Astor.
“You look different,” I said.
“Is that good? Or just different?”
“You look good without all that makeup.”
Nadia pointed out a black Lincoln Town Car parked in front of
Astor. We stood together for a moment, right by the fire escape, the one I’d managed to hoist Nadia up the night we’d sneaked into Aidan’s room. Nadia was rocking back and forth on her heels.
“Wanted you to know, I never saw her,” she said. “Never had a chance to give Aidan your message.”
I nodded. Aidan had died on the night of the storm. She’d come to shore with the yachts. I’d spent days looking for someone who was already gone.
“I can’t miss class.” Nadia took a few steps backward.
We said good-bye and I was surprised when Nadia sprung forward, clasping her arms loosely around my waist, tucking her head against my chest, hugging me. She was so tiny and awkward. Too young to be away from her family. It was clear that she needed someone to look after her, but here she was looking after me.
As Nadia walked away, I shouted, “Thank you.”
“But I didn’t do anything,” she said.
I called out, “You have no idea.”
I waited around outside until a man in a brown suit and black sunglasses left Astor pushing a dolly stacked with boxes. A woman followed him. I recognized Aidan’s mother from the photograph. She held a pair of Fred Astaire’s tap shoes in one hand and a brown cigarette in the other. She was tall, almost as tall as me. She didn’t look like any mother
I’d ever seen. Her long hair was blond and copper like Aidan’s, but where her daughter’s was wild and natural, the mother’s was perfectly sectioned into costly spiral ringlets. She wore a purple-andgreen dress, and even though it had no formal waist, even though my mom would have called the outfit a muumuu, somehow Aidan’s mother managed to look even more slender and slight. Her body lost inside all that fabric.
I don’t know why, but I expected Aidan’s mother to recognize me.
Thought she might call out my name and rush toward me. I wanted to believe that Aidan had told her mother about us. As she approached, I could smell the clove blowing off her cigarette. Her hands ablaze with rings. Aquamarine and amethyst stones the size of a child’s fist. She came closer and I could smell her perfume. Patchouli. Not the musky toilet water hippies bought at head shops. Her cologne was sultry and fresh. She smelled like California before everyone went west. When California was just an idea, just the ocean carrying its breath over land. I wanted her to take me wherever she was going.
I wasn’t sure if the man pushing the dolly was a driver or something more, a bodyguard or boyfriend. He popped open the trunk and didn’t see me as I approached Aidan’s mother and introduced myself.
“I was your daughter’s friend,” I said, my voice hoarse.
Aidan’s mother put her cigarette up to her lips. She inhaled, holding the smoke down deep in her chest, then exhaling with purpose. “Glad to hear my daughter had a friend.”
While the driver packed the trunk, we sat together in the back of the Town Car sinking into the plush seats. I wasn’t sure where to begin, what to say about Aidan, how to raise my suspicions. I couldn’t imagine the pain of losing a child. Of no longer being a mother.
“Are you young for a teacher or old for a student?” she asked. I smiled. “Student.”
She held out a box of Djarum cigarettes and told me to call her
Marieke.
“Marieke,” I said. “That’s pretty. I’ve never heard that before.” “It means star of the sea.” She lit my cigarette. “But it’s really just a
fancy way of saying Marie. Aidan used to make fun of all the kids here and their silly East Coast names. Tizzey and Dizzey.” Marieke reached over to the front seat and with one hand dug into an enormous leather purse. She immediately located what she was looking for and slipped either a mint or a pill into her mouth.
I took a long drag on the cigarette, the clove oil like candy on my lips. For a moment, I thought that if I made my eyelids heavy, my sight blurry, I could convince myself that it was Aidan and not her mother I was sitting beside. That Aidan had been returned to me. I wanted to tell Marieke that I was sorry for her loss that I missed her daughter. Instead, I just kept smoking.
Marieke opened the window, flicking ashes, straightening her rings. I let the cigarette burn between my fingers. When Aidan first told me about her mom, I’d imagined meeting her in Malibu, quizzing her about Jerry Garcia and Jane Fonda. This was not the happy occasion I’d hoped for. I kept thinking about the film Marieke had produced. A story about an old man and his cat. I’d never seen the movie, but Aidan had warned me that if I ever met her mother, I needed to tell her how much I loved it. “It’s an ego thing,” she said. “Tell her it made you cry.”
I feared that anything I said about Aidan would bore or annoy Marieke, afraid that at any moment she might finish smoking and be done with me. I was about to bring up Race’s party when she stuck her head out the window and summoned the driver, then turned to me and asked, “Can you show me where they found her?”
We drove to the beach. Marieke had dozens of silver bangles on her wrists, the bracelets crashing against one another like cymbals. I kept thinking of the cat, not the one in Marieke’s film but the one in Aesop’s fable, the one the mice gave the bell to so they’d always hear her coming.
Aidan had said that when her mother was a young girl, she’d used her inheritance to finance her freedom, running away from home, flirting with young musicians and old movie stars. Positioning herself as muse, starlet, businesswoman. “She’s not a bad mother, she’s just not interested in mothering. When she’s in a room, there’s not enough air for anyone else.”
The car windows were tinted brown. They turned the sky to smog, the sand to dirt, the ocean to mud. When we parked at the beach, Marieke leaned forward and asked the driver, “Is this what you thought it would look like?”
He said, “Ma’am, I didn’t make a clear picture.”
“I think it’s rather ordinary.” Marieke unzipped her tall purple suede boots and slipped out her feet. I wasn’t used to noticing things like nail polish, but Marieke’s toes were painted a familiar cobalt blue. From her purse she removed a small cloth bag with a drawstring and said, “Show me what my daughter saw in this place.”
There wasn’t much to see. The yachts were gone. The sea grass matted down. The low tide had left behind pockets of brackish water. Dried beds of seaweed made the beach seem shabby, unkempt. I walked Marieke down to the sandbar, pointed to the groin of rocks. “That’s where she was standing the first time we met.” I paused, then asked, “Did she ever mention me when you two spoke?”
“Hard to say.” The winds swirled around Marieke, her dress rippling against her body. I could see how thin she was. She had a flat chest, the buds of her nipples pushing against the silk. Marieke held up her hand and pointed to one of her rings. “Aidan gave me this little gem.” A large green stone towered over her index finger. “We were watching the surfers climb the waves along Dana Point. Aidan found this piece of beach glass. She must have been ten years old. I had it made into a ring. See how the light shines through.” She held the ring up for me to see.
The green stone glowed warmly from within, emitting a strong yellow nimbus of light.
I said, “Aidan was like a light meter. She could mea sure whether a person gave off light or took light. Your daughter was incredible.”
“We all take more light than we give.” Marieke asked if I wouldn’t mind putting some sand in her little cloth bag. “I’m making a reliquary.”
I didn’t know what that word meant, but I squatted down and sprinkled dry sand into the tiny sack, slipped in a pair of shiny yellow shells, jingle shells, Cal called them, inside before handing the bag back to Marieke.
“I’m not going to blame myself,” Marieke said. “Mothers are always blamed when their children are hurt.”
I tucked my hands into my jeans pockets.
“It’s her father’s fault,” Marieke said. “I could never kill myself.”
Without meaning to, I’d stumbled on to something. Marieke reached out and brushed a few stray hairs off my forehead. “What’s your name again?”
“Jason.”
“Jason, you’ll have to forgive me. I’m feeling terribly lost. My therapist says I’m creating my own stages of grief.”
Her perfect hair blew across her face. She reached up, gathering her curls together, tying them into a knot. Her bracelets chiming in the wind. An airplane flew overhead. Across the water, boats were being salvaged, ships were being built, money was being made.
“I really don’t think it was a suicide,” I said. “An accident maybe. But I think these boys, the ones with the silly names, they might have done something. There was a party and I don’t know what I happened but I can imagine—”
Marieke shook her head and interrupted. “Until this morning, I was willing to believe anything. But your headmaster, he gave me the letter they found. I wish he hadn’t. Now I know it wasn’t an accident. Aidan wanted this. You have no idea how sick this whole thing makes me.” She turned her back to me for a moment. Her body shivered. “I forgot how cold it gets,” she said. “I thought my daughter would be safe here. Why did I think she’d be safe?”
Marieke twisted the ring off her finger. She held up the green glass to the light, showed me how the ocean had smoothed the surface, how a single bump in the glass looked like a wave. Then she knelt down onto the beach, her dress
blooming around her. “I imagined setting up a memorial out here. Maybe making a cross out of driftwood. That seems foolish now.” With her manicured hands she dug deep into the wet sand, scooping out piles of pebbles. When she finished digging, she dropped the ring down into the hole. She said something, a prayer maybe, performing her grief.
A hermit crab sidestepped around the gully. Marieke picked up the crab, its red body retracting inside its small brown house of a shell. She poked her finger into the opening where the crab had disappeared, and when the crab didn’t pop back out, she dropped it down the hole. Marieke cast a handful of sand down after the crab. She buried the ring and the crab together. Like a child collapsing a sand castle, she patted down the wet beach. “There,” she said. “Enough.”
The letter complicated matters, but it didn’t change the fact that Aidan had been at Race’s. I tried to imagine what was in Aidan’s note, what turn of phrase had convinced Marieke that her daughter had taken her own life. More than anything, I wanted to read the letter, but that was not an intimacy I could demand. Driving back to Bellingham, I struggled over bringing up the party again. It seemed cruel to force the issue. Instead, I reassured Marieke that Aidan had been happy these last few weeks.
“Sometimes,” she said, “happiness is the boost people need.” Marieke jangled her bracelets. “My therapist doesn’t worry about her depressives until they begin to feel better. That’s precisely when they summon up the energy to walk into the ocean.”
I looked out the window. “When did you last speak with Aidan?” I asked. “How did she sound to you?”
Marieke had placed the tap shoes on the floor. She held up the blackand-white patent leather shoes and asked if Aidan had ever shown them to me. Then she leaned forward and showed the driver. He said, “Wow, Astaire had small feet.”
Marieke turned to me and asked, “Do you want them?”
I did. I wanted something of Aidan’s. Cal’s mother had promised to give me his watch. An old Breitling with an enormous face and a marine chronometer. The kind of timepiece a sailor could actually use to determine longitude for celestial navigation. Caroline had meant to give me the watch at Cal’s memorial ser vice, but I saw her wearing it around her own thin wrist. It was much too big. It looked like it actually hurt her wrist to wear it, but she claimed she couldn’t bring herself to let it go. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but it’s a comfort to me.”
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